In these days, various types of clinical analyzers for the automated processing of biological fluids such as blood, serum and urine are being in practical use. Sample preparation and analysis of biological fluids basically involves handling and mixing of the fluids using various components such as multi-well plates, pipette trays, pipette tips and bottles filled with reagents, buffers, wash solutions and the like, which may be subsumed by the generic term “consumables”. When operable in a stand-alone mode, analyzers typically are manually preloaded with consumables needed for the processing of fluids prior to starting the automated fluid processing.
Since there is a strong demand for offering a wide variety of analytical options and with a view to improve effectiveness in sample processing, analyzers often process samples in parallel and/or split each sample into a number of sample aliquots for the simultaneous processing thereof deploying different analytical techniques. Due to the high sample throughput and dependent on the number of analytical options offered, modern apparatus are subject to an elevated consumption of consumables which they have to be charged with.
However, in daily routine, a problem may occur that consumables needed for the automated processing of fluids are misplaced or even missing because of human error when manually preloading the analyzer. Albeit, even in case of automatically preloading of consumables, since there is a risk of dropping or misplacing of objects due to misalignment errors, misplacement or absence of consumables cannot be excluded. This especially applies to the case of modern analyzers which, according to the above, normally are subject to an elevated consumption of consumables requiring many preloading operations.
In modern analyzers, missing or misplaced consumables will automatically cause a stop of a current run which entails a delay for starting the next run and may also give rise to repeat the aborted run which lowers efficiency in fluid processing. Even worse, accidental stops may constitute a need to discard the fluid samples currently processed, which has to be avoided since some fluids require delicate extraction operations or are unique in a sense that they cannot be reproduced such as in forensic applications.